Wednesday, 1 October 2014

Theresa May and the Return of the Snoopers' Charter, by Loz Kaye

This
year's conference season has seen the parties laying out their stalls for
2015's General Election.

Given her attitude to civil liberties it should
probably come as no surprise that Theresa May's contribution has been to vow
that a future Tory government would reintroduce the “Snoopers' Charter”.

Once
again the Conservatives are angling to strip us of liberties and privacy in the
name of the war on terror.

We
have already had this debate during this parliament.

The Communications Data
Bill (dubbed the Snoopers' Charter) was intended to further extend already
existing powers to retain information on our communications.

In other words, who
all of us phone, email, text, location data and much more.

It was rejected as
disproportionate, and after all significant obligations already exist for
telcos and ISPs to retain this data.

The
rejection of the ever further eroding of our rights to a private life has
clearly rankled. Politicians have cynically seized every opportunity to try and
press for the widening of the scope of mass surveillance powers.

Each time
there is a new atrocity the argument is made that the Communications Data Bill
would be a way of preventing it.

Former Home Secretaries queueing up to use the
appalling murder of Lee Rigby as a justification for the Snoopers' Charter
without a shred of evidence that more intelligence would have made a difference
was a particularly nauseating example.

Yet again we have Theresa May at the
Conservative Conference saying that we are facing a “crisis in national security”.

The
specific justification made each time for further powers is that there is a
declining ability of the police and security services to monitor phone and Internet
use. Home Secretaries are presenting this as if it's an upgrade to do with the
rapid change of technology and the way that we communicate.

Yet we know from
the Snowden revelations that it is simply not the case that our capabilities
have fallen behind, quite the reverse.

The myriad alphabet soup of surveillance
programmes – PRISM, TEMPORA, XKEYSCORE and the rest have an unprecedented
reach.

For
example GCHQ's ability to tap in to the transatlantic fibre optic cables has in
secret allowed it to access to vast streams of sensitive personal information.

The Guardian compared the sheer volume to being equivalent to sending the
entire British Library 192 times each day. This is hardly a diminishing
capability as Theresa May claims.

All of this took place without proper public
debate and under an oversight regime that GCHQ lawyers themselves described as
“light”.

It's
preposterous of the Home Secretary to claim that we “risk sleepwalking in to a
society in which crime can no longer be investigated”.

This is clearly just
pre-election jockeying for position to be able to accuse the Liberal
Democrats of “outrageous
irresponsibility” for not backing the Snoopers' Charter.

In fact she of all
people must be aware that far from preventing mass surveillance, the LibDems
have allowed it to continue in government.

This is shown by their craven
backing of shoving the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act or “DRIP “
through parliament in a matter of days.

The
latest justification for blanket powers is the rise of ISIL. Yet the alarming
success of these extremists shows the failure of massive blanket communications
interception.

ISIL has grown up, apparently been operating oil refineries and
command posts, UK citizens have left to fight in the Middle East, under the all
seeing eye of what Edward Snowden described as “the largest programme of
suspicionless surveillance in human history”.

Either the US and UK have not
actually been able to make sense of the vast streams of data, or we have and
not known what to do about it.

The key dishonesty of all those who argue for
further invasions of privacy is to confuse monitoring all of us with monitoring
where it's required.

Limiting
our collective liberty is no guarantee of our security, far from it.

Theresa
May hoped for British values prevailing and winning the day in her speech. The British values I want to see prevail are
preserving liberty and private life.